Life

First Things First

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“Do first things first, and second things not at all.”  – Peter Drucker

I love this quote. It’s about prioritization and deciding what to focus on in your life, in your work, with your time.

If you don’t know your mission and your vision, you won’t know what goals to set.  If you don’t know your goals, you won’t have a list of goals to prioritize.  If you don’t prioritize the list, you won’t know the most important thing to focus on right now.  If you don’t know what’s most important for you to focus on and get done now, you will not reach your goals, fulfill your vision, and complete your mission.

Clearly, I haven’t prioritized blogging, or you’d see more from me here.  I’ve been focused on growing in my career and at my work.  And that’s okay — it’s a conscious trade-off I’ve made.  And I’ve been focused on my life, dealing with the day to day elements of living, the grimy problems that come up that require the same sort of thought and juggling and prioritization.  Now I have to put down this laptop and go help assemble a side table because that’s my current “first thing”. 

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What It’s Like

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Paul Graham has an excellent essay entitled “What Startups are Really Like.”  Read it here.

I found myself surprised at how often I agreed with the words of PG or the entrepreneurs he quoted within.  My experience working at Athleon has taught me many of the lessons he mentions within his essay.  Particularly, the lesson that entrepreneurs work on a different time-flow than the rest of the world, and the emotional roller coaster a startup can be.

Over the course of the past year, I have loved working with Brent, Ryan, Jason, and Dan on Athleon and I am incredibly proud of the product and how far it has come in a year.  With this  small team of 5 (now 4), we have launched All Team Apparel, the Game Film beta, an updated version of Playbooks, and rewritten large components of the back-end code (running on Debian Linux, Apache 2, MySQL, and Perl with some features written in Flex/AS3) to prepare the site to scale for future growth.

Nobody says startup life is easy.  The past year has not been, but I wouldn’t do things differently.  The lessons I’ve learned have been valuable, hard-earned, and worth it.

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